On Monday, UFC heavyweight Travis Browne confirmed to the world that he was in a personal relationship with women's bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey, a relationship which had been rumored as far back as August. Browne was the first to speak up on the matter, with Rousey issuing this brief statement to ESPN immediately afterwards:
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"I don't talk about my personal life much. That's why it's called 'personal life,'" Rousey said. "It's true that Travis and I are in a relationship. I've really enjoyed the time we have spent together and getting to know one another. And that's all I'm going to say about it."
While the controversy surrounding Browne's alleged domestic abuse has been spotlighted more frequently, Rousey was also involved in a violent altercation, by her own admission, with an ex-boyfriend a few years ago after she found out that he'd been taking nude photographs of her. She described the incident in detail in her best-selling autobiography (released in May 2015), My Fight / Your Fight : (H/T Sean Mooney)
Before the book was released, Rousey talked about "Snappers McCreepy" in an interview with SiriusXM, saying that the incident was the reason why she opted to pose for ESPN's Body Issue magazine, but had never mentioned physically beating him up:
"It was right before my first title fight, actually," Rousey said on the Opie Radio' show on SiriusXM. "It was like two weeks before and I was pumping out a lot of social media to try and get people to pay attention. He went to work and I stayed behind and was using his computer. I was downloading a picture off Facebook so I could put it on to Twitter. You know how it shows the preview of recent downloads?
"I was downloading something and then I just saw a bunch of ass! 'What is that?' It looked like it was amateurly taken. I had to look so I looked at it and it was all me."
The Rousey-Browne affair has quickly made a splash outside of the MMA world. Fox News, New York Daily News, People Magazine, TMZ, Washington Post, Daily Mail (UK), US Weekly, E! Online, and several other prominent news and celebrity publications. With Rousey being hailed as MMA's biggest ever star, it is to be expected that her personal relationship with Browne will be under the microscope on a near-constant basis.
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